Bright Stone the Ice Age Climate Denier

Bright Stone the Tailor from the Green lived some 25,000 years ago in northern Germany in a band of some 25 people embedded with some other such bands in a larger community of some 500 people. They lived by hunting animals large and small, and by gathering berries. Though the land was cold and dry and windswept, with only scattered trees, it nevertheless supported sizable populations of animals that these people hunted. Woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, deer, bison, horses, rabbits, ... They even had plenty of competition, from lions, bears, hyenas, wolves, lynx, foxes, polecats, ...

They could use much of the animals they hunted, to make clothing, tents, bags, and a variety of tools, and they also made tools from wood and stone. They lived in conical tents made of animal skin with poles made from the surrounding trees. Bright Stone became known as "the tailor" because of her expertise in making warm clothing from animal skins.

But the climate was deteriorating, becoming colder and colder, and the animals became rarer and the berry bushes also. The Green, a big grove of trees and bushes near a river, was becoming less green. Bright Stone would ramble about how easy it was to find animals and berries in her youth, and she alternated between saying how lazy people are and saying how some people were attacking the animals and berries with sorcery. She was getting unhinged, but many people continued to respect her for her clothing-making skills, if nothing else.

A fellow elder, Enduring Bear, had a different response. He had hunted a lot in his earlier years, but as he slowed down, he mainly made hunting gear like spears and axes, and he often rambled about his adventures and misadventures from his years of hunting, like the time a bison picked up a fellow hunter with its head and tossed him. From what the other hunters were saying, he started to think that the community will have to move to a nicer place.

Bright Stone and Enduring Bear were at loggerheads as to what to do about that, with Bright Stone saying that where we were living is where we belong, and Enduring Bear saying that there is no sense staying in a bad place to live. But where to move to? The south seemed nice, but there were plenty of people already there, and Enduring Bear didn't like the idea of running into them. Bright Stone thought that they were icky and that they talked funny.

They considered moving northward, and in early summer, Running Reindeer, Sneaky Polecat, and some others from across the community packed up a big supply of pemmican and went northward. After half a month of walking, they came across what looked like a huge snowdrift. They camped for the night near it and the next morning, they went to it and walked onto it. Lots of crunchy snow. They kept on going, using their spears as walking sticks, and they found no end of this snow even after some hours of walking. To the north there was nothing but snow as far as they could see.

Polecat started talking about where to camp, and Reindeer and the others conceded that they had were not well-prepared for camping on snow and ice. Late in the morning, they paused to rest, and Polecat became concerned that they might not be able to find a good spot for a campsite.

"So if we can't find one, the safest thing to do is return?" said Reindeer.

"Yes", said Polecat.

Then Polecat got the idea of digging a hole in the snow to see if one could reach the ground. "If one can't make a campsite here, then we ought to return", he said, "because if we go further, we may not make it back in time."

Reindeer agreed, and Polecat and some others started digging a hole in the snow. Reindeer said "We'll scout around our campsite to see if there's anything", and he warned his companions not to go too far.

When Reindeer returned, Polecat and the others had made a sizable hole in the snow, but they were struggling to cut through the ice with their stone axes, and Reindeer and his companions joined in. After finding nothing but ice, they decided to play it safe and return home. Reindeer said that he wasn't going to gamble on the snow and ice getting any thinner.

When they returned home, they described what they found, and Enduring Bear said that this was worse than he thought. He remembered stories about ice-covered land far to the north, but the ice was getting close. So it was time to move away from the ice, even if it meant moving southward.

At a community gathering late that summer, where to go next was a big topic of discussion. It wasn't a matter of if they should move but when, and it was clear that the north was no place to go. The east and the west were just as bad as home, so the only way to go was south.

Bright Stone went on long rants about how icky the southern people were, how their talking was totally weird, and how they like to eat people. She also ranted at length about how there was some clique of sorcerers that was causing the increasingly hostile environment. What should we do about them? someone asked. "Eat them. They deserve nothing better," she responded.

Nobody else found that very convincing, however, and Enduring Bear said that even if it is sorcery, it's very persistent, and we'll have to move. "This winter should be our last winter here," he said.

Enduring Bear then described some previous moves that he'd been in, and the others were interested in how they got through it back then. Mainly by focusing on hunting and gathering and drying out meat and making pemmican and letting a lot of stuff fall apart, since they wouldn't be moving with it. Enduring Bear had a lot of helpful advice on what to keep and what to leave behind.

So the people of the community did that, even Bright Stone and Enduring Bear, helping to hunt rabbits and suchlike small animals and looking for wolf dens and the like. Not very many of them, they discovered.

They got through late fall, winter, and early spring, and by late spring, it was finally time to go. They still had some pemmican with them so they didn't have to hunt very much. Bright Stone made one last plea to find those sorcerers, and Enduring Bear said "I guess we aren't lazy anymore." But since everybody else was getting ready to move, Bright Stone reluctantly went along with them. She didn't want to become the meal of some predator, some wolf or bear or lion or hyena.

They disassembled their tents and packed up in tent sheets what they wanted to take with them, clothes, blankets, bags, tools, and other such stuff. Bright Stone had a roundish statuette of an obviously pregnant woman that she called Big Mama. She said that it helped her through her first pregnancy, which was a rather difficult one. Enduring Bear seemed rather skeptical, and Bright Stone once responded with "What can I lose? If I keep Big Mama with me, and she helps me, that's great. If I keep her with me, and she doesn't help me, then it's no different from if I didn't keep her at all."

They moved southward, pulling their tent poles behind them, tent poles with their other stuff on them. Bright Stone grumbled a lot, but Enduring Bear took it in stride.

The move southward was a slow trudge, but as the days went by, the vegetation became more and more abundant, and after over a month of traveling, the members of the community decided to settle down and make new campsites. They didn't find much evidence of other people nearby, and the campsites that they found were old and abandoned ones. To many people of the community, it seemed like good fortune, but Enduring Bear was sure that the former inhabitants also moved southward to get away from the bad climate and the oncoming ice. "They did what we did."

They settled down, and they rebuilt their tents and started hunting and gathering again. They found more animals and berries than they did in their old home, though Bright Stone continued to grumble that this was not the community's true home. Enduring Bear, however, found his thoughts drifting toward an odd conundrum. He had traveled a lot over his life and he knew people who traveled even farther. But no matter how far people travel, they never reach the edges of the Earth. Even so, some people told of very odd things, like huge lakes of salty water. Enduring Bear didn't know what to make of such stories, but for now, he had a good home.